Judge tosses claims leveled against Bergen Prosecutor’s Office

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office is no longer a defendant in a federal lawsuit lodged by a slain mobster’s family alleging investigators stole his money and leaked his identity as an informant before he was killed.

The claims against the office by the estate of Frank Lagano of Tenafly were dismissed because the lawsuit was not filed within legal time limits, a federal judge ruled. The Prosecutor’s Office is also immune from federal civil-rights claims that arise from its regular investigative duties, the judge wrote in a decision filed Friday.

Still named as a defendant is the prosecutor’s former chief of detectives and newly appointed Hackensack police director, Michael Mordaga, whom the lawsuit alleges had a personal and business relationship with Lagano. Mordaga has denied that. He did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The lawsuit, filed in August, is in its early stages; in her ruling, U.S. District Judge Faith S. Hochberg did not address the allegations themselves.

Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli, whose office was defended by the state Division of Law, said that the dismissal was a vindication.

“I never believed it had any basis,” he said of the lawsuit.

He added that he expected that Mordaga, who is represented by a different state attorney, would soon ask for a dismissal of the claims against him based on the same reasoning cited by the judge.

The lawsuit grew out of Lagano’s 2004 arrest by Molinelli’s office, the result of a mob-related gambling investigation code-named Operation Jersey Boyz. The gambling case partially collapsed due to what a state judge described as investigative missteps, but it gave rise to an entirely different set of legal battles that have smoldered for nearly a decade since the arrest.

The lawsuit alleges that unnamed personnel in the Prosecutor’s Office stole some of the money seized from Lagano during a raid at his Tenafly home and from his safe-deposit box. It claims that, after Lagano’s arrest, Mordaga pushed Lagano to hire a handpicked criminal defense attorney who could make most of his legal troubles go away.

It also alleges that someone from the office later told other mobsters that Lagano, a reputed Lucchese crime family member, had become an informant for a separate law-enforcement agency, and that that leak resulted in his still-unsolved killing. In 2007, Lagano was shot execution-style in the parking lot of a diner he owned in Middlesex County.

The Jersey Boyz case and its aftermath was the subject of an article in The Record in December. The article found that Mordaga had used his county-issued cellphone to call Lagano several times, including on Christmas Eve of 2003, months before the investigation began. A mutual acquaintance of the two men also told a reporter that they had been friends for decades.

Mordaga has said that every conversation he had with Lagano related to “police business” and that none of the allegations in the lawsuit are true.

Molinelli said on Wednesday that he believed the federal lawsuit was lodged “to put pressure on us to turn over seized assets” to the Lagano family. More than $264,000 confiscated from Lagano is the subject of a separate legal proceeding that has dragged on for years and will determine whether Molinelli’s office can keep the seized cash.

“We don’t just seize money and not account for it,” Molinelli said.

Attorney William H. Buckman, who represents the Lagano estate in the federal lawsuit, said his client was “disappointed” with the ruling but was “still analyzing the opinion to see where we can go with it.” An appeal is one option, he said. He declined to comment further.

A spokesman for the state’s Division of Law, an agency within the Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment on the dismissal or the continuing case as it relates to Mordaga.

Hochberg wrote in the ruling that people, not state agencies, are subject to the provisions of federal and state civil-rights laws cited in the lawsuit. She also wrote that county prosecutors are immune from federal civil claims related to routine investigative work, citing the 11th Amendment, which limits the power of federal courts to hear lawsuits against state governments, and a U.S. Supreme Court decision. And she ruled that the two-year statute of limitations for claims that Lagano’s money was stolen in 2004 had long passed when the estate filed the lawsuit in federal court last August.